2013Q3 Reports: SIGDIAL

REPORT ON SIGdial ACTIVITIES: June 2012 to June 2013

Amanda Stent, SIGdial President

SIGdial is the ACL and ISCA Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue. More information about SIGdial can be found on our website: http://www.sigdial.org, including an updated calendar of upcoming events, resources, and previous reports. Users can also become members from the website; membership are added to a low-volume, moderated mailing list (mainly conference and job announcements). SIGdial is fully compliant with ACL and ISCA guidelines for SIGs.

In February/March of 2013, SIGdial, with the invaluable help of YRRSDS, held our biennial election. The current Executive Board members are Amanda Stent (President), Jason Williams (Vice President), and Kristiina Jokinen (Secretary/Treasurer). The Scientific Advisory Board consists of three appointed and three elected members: Luciana Benotti, Raquel Fernandez Rovira, Kazunori Komatani, Matthew Purver, Verena Rieser, David Traum.  Additional positions are President Emeritus: Tim Paek, IUI liaison:  Candace Sidner, SIG SLUD/JSAI liaison: Yasuhiro Katagiri, ISCA Liaison: Michael Picheny, AVIOS Liaison: Alexander Rudnicky, SIGSEM Liaison: Harry Bunt, SIGGEN Liaison: Verena Rieser, IEEE SLT Liaison: Fabrice Lefevre, and Mailing List Maintainer: Laurent Romary.

SIGdial has held an annual workshop on discourse and dialogue since 2000. Due to our steady growth of members, starting in 2009, the SIGDIAL venue became a conference and began to recognize Best Paper awards. SIGDIAL 2012 was held was held in Seoul, South Korea, in "near co-location" with ACL 2012. The General Chairs were Gary Geunbae Lee and Jonathan Ginzburg, and the Program Chairs were Amanda Stent and Claire Gardent. The local organizing committee comprised Minhwa Chung, Hyung Soon Kim, Jungyun Seo and Sunhee Kim.  The Mentoring Chair was Kallirroi Georgila and the Sponsorship Chair was Jason Williams. Sponsorships came from AT&T, AVIOS, Honda Research Institute, Microsoft Research, IBM Research, Korea Telecom, NHN Corporation and Seoul National University. For SIGDIAL 2012, 63 papers were submitted, 40 of which were accepted as long papers, 19 as short papers and 4 as demo papers.

For SIGDIAL 2012, a number of new initiatives were implemented. First, the SIGDIAL Board decided to video-record selected talks and archive them on the web. Toward this effort, we received a generous grant of 1,000 Euros from the ISCA Interspeech 2010 Board. Second, the Executive Board and the Conference Committee decided to fund student travel via the ISCA Student Travel Grant application process. For travel to Seoul Korea, SIGDIAL funded 3 students at $600 each. ISCA also generously funded 3 students.

The videos from SIGDIAL 2012 have been viewed a total of about 625 times. Some of the views are partial views, where someone watches only a portion of a talk. Complete talks have been watched about 150 times.

SIGDIAL 2013 will be help in Lyon, France on August 22-24 in co-location with INTERSPEECH 2013. The General Chairs are Maxine Eskenazi and Michael Strube.  The Program Chairs are Barbara DiEugenio, Jason Williams.  The Local Chair is Olivier Pietquin.  The Mentoring Chair is Kallirroi Georgila and the Sponsorships Chair is Amanda Stent.  Sponsors include Apple, AT&T Labs - Research, HITS, Microsoft, Nuance, and Samsung. SIGDIAL 2013 has been extended by half a day compared with previous SIGDIAL meetings, to accommodate the colocation of the Dialog State Tracking Challenge.  As with SIGDIAL 2012, we will video record and archive oral presentations, and sponsor student travel grants.

SIGdial also endorses a number of other dialogue-related workshops and events that are open to the general community. The SIGdial Endorsed events for 2013 are:

• August, 2013: Young Researcher's Roundtable in Spoken Dialogue Systems
• August, 2013:  Dialog State Tracking Challenge
• December, 2013:  SEMDIAL (DialDam)